Monday, July 6, 2015

Even though I knew this day would come, I don’t much like
it. I’m sitting in a very quiet house today because yesterday I made the very
hard choice to help Smudge leave this world of pain.

She was a good cat.

When I posted something on Facebook, just a sweet picture of
her wandering in front of the azaleas this spring, I knew that most would figure
out the reason I had changed my profile picture. Condolences came in from just
about every continent – Australia, Asia, Europe, South America, Africa.

Smudge had led such a well-traveled and well-documented life that not only did she have fans and followers from everywhere, but a good
portion of those people had met her. Or had come face to face with her as she
glared at them from under a chair or behind a door.

Because let’s face it, Smudge only liked one person. Me. And
even I got on her nerves from time to time. This was a cat who would not deign
to sit on my lap for the first ten years of her life. When she finally
discovered the joys of lap-sitting, I could not keep her away, even when the
temperature hovered in the 90s. In her later years, she would camp out there
for as long as I would let her, tucking her head under and having a look of
sheer contentment on her face.

When we adopted Smudge from the Humane Society, she got her
name because she was just a tiny gray smudge of a thing, small enough to fit in
the palm of our hand. I knew I would adopt her when I lifted her out of her
cage and she started purring.

Home for most of her life was our house on Burlington Place,
where she could sit on the window seat in the family room watching the birds
fly by, or sit on the back patio catching a few rays of sun. She was too timid
to wander much past our little yard, and that was fine by me.

She was still a young cat when we moved with her to Brussels
for a year. There we lived in a four-story townhouse with a walled-in garden, a
lovely spot when it wasn’t raining. I thought it kept Smudge from wandering
far, but one day I saw her high atop a ten-foot wall and knew that her European
adventures were bigger than I realized.

Our favorite story about Smudge in Brussels involved the
trauma of the move. We were living in a temporary apartment with a fireplace.
As we were in the processing of moving to our townhouse, Daniel called me and
said, “I can’t find Smudge. I think she either took the elevator down or jumped
off the fourth-floor balcony of the apartment.”

I rushed back to the apartment. Before I could start the
search, Smudge appeared from a ledge inside the very dirty fireplace. She was
covered in soot, a true smudge. That was, I suppose, one of her nine lives
gone.

Getting her back to Washington seemed relatively easy, and I
could tell that she knew she was home again the minute she got into our house.

Over the next dozen years, she had the life of a cat,
getting chubby and lazy, lolling in the sunshine and rebuffing any attempts by
the kids to make friends with her. She was a quiet cat, hardly mewing or making
any kind of sound.

I’d look down and there was her dark presence, by my side.
If it wasn’t possible to be in my lap, she’d content herself with being near me
in a room or begging treats from me in the kitchen.

She never much loved the Chinese brand of cat food so I
became a cat food Sherpa, bringing dozens of cans of high end cat food from the
U.S. to satisfy her elderly and finicky palate. She even had a food donation
from the American ambassador. When Ambassador Max Baucus and his wife were
moving to China, they also moved a giant bin of cat food with them. But somehow
the cat didn’t make the trip, and so we ended up with a diplomatic delivery of
Iams cat food that lasted Smudge many months.

In China, she would sit on a chair by the window of our
glassed-in quasi-patio area, while I typed on the computer. As an older girl,
she didn’t have much interest in the magpies that landed in the trees outside
the windows. Then again, she wasn’t much bothered by the endless hours of
fireworks on Chinese new year either, so that was a good thing.

And even though I knew she was slowly dying of renal
failure, she lasted long enough that she was able to enjoy the warm weather of
a Washington spring and part of the summer.

We had an overload of rabbits in DC
this year, and one day I looked up to see Smudge bouncing after a bunny who was
as big as she was. There was life in the old girl to the end.

By the end, she was ready to end the pain. She didn’t want
to be touched, she stopped eating and drinking, and her plaintive cries were
wrenching. It was time.

When I brought her to the animal hospital, I never left her
side. I held her in her red blanket that she loved, and I talked to her and pet
her, my tears dropping down on her head as I spoke. She went peacefully, and
then she wasn’t there any more.

Later on Sunday, I went out into my garden, and there, as if
it was waiting for me, was the tiniest bunny I had ever seen, with big brown
eyes. It was just a smudge of a thing.